


Days without rain

by Lia (Liafic)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Explicit Language, F/M, Mystery, Paranormal, Psychological Trauma, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-09-08
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2017-10-23 13:20:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/250742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liafic/pseuds/Lia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermione finds Malfoy dying on her doorstep, and things start to get strange.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Hermione wakes up, and the world is swimming in moonlit shadows and the sound of rain on her windows. Has she fallen asleep on her desk at the Ministry? No, when she rolls over, her bed sheets tangle uncomfortably around her waist, and the numbers on her alarm clock flash from the nightstand.

From somewhere in the distance, the emptiness of her flat thumps with a muffled sound, an incessant knock at her door, and she reaches around for the lamp switch. She runs the back of her hand across her eyes, the sleepy heat of her cheeks. It’s two thirty in the morning, and someone is screaming. 

She stands up too fast, stumbling into the hallway with darkness still blooming behind her eyes. The floor is cold, and she presses randomly across the wall until she hits the switch that illuminates the entryway in blindingly bright light. She feels dizzy, feverish. Above all else, she feels an almost painful compulsion not to open the door. She imagines a dark figure waiting at the threshold, and fear hovers like the thrill that used to shiver over her as a child whenever she climbed the stairs alone at night. 

When she pulls the handle, her wards wash through her in a chill wave of pale blue, and she stares into the darkness of the hallway, where the sconce lights flicker dimly. She sees his eyes first: electric grey. His clothes and hair are drenched as though he’s been walking in the rain for hours, and he watches her with an unfocused gaze that makes her wonder for one surreal moment whether he even remembers who she is. 

He leans forward with shaking hands against her doorframe. “Granger?” he says, a hoarse croak of a sound. 

This is strange—she feels as though she might be dreaming. She opens her mouth to scream, but there’s only a distant roaring in her ears, and everything is too bright. When his fingers creep across the threshold, twitching toward her throat, she slams the door forward with a loud crunch of bones snapping as his wrist is caught against the frame. 

With a strangled yell, he is thrown into the wall opposite by the strength of her wards, and he slumps down again on his knees as his body shudders. “Do you know?” he chokes out. He watches her reaching for her wand, pulling it out and pointing it toward him. He staggers forward again, and at her whispered curse, his hands fly up around his neck, his thumbs pressing into his throat. He chokes around a lack of oxygen, trying to speak. 

“Promise me you won’t move,” she says. “Just—stay where you are, Malfoy! Just don’t come any closer.” 

He watches her in strangled silence, his eyes beginning to roll back and his lips turning a mottled shade of purple. In a rush, she drops her wand and he falls forward, crouched in half motion like an animal. Her heart thuds painfully in her chest. 

“What are you even—why are you here?” she says. 

He pushes himself up and staggers forward, reaching for her and pushing through her wards in a crackle of electric blue. 

“Stop!” she screams. “Stop it!” 

He’s still reaching, his fingers twitching. Panic courses through her, and she suddenly has the worst feeling, like the suffocating claustrophobic emptiness of death. His eyes have gone completely blank. His thumb brushes the bottom of her cheek. 

He says, “It followed me, Granger. It followed me home.” 

She screams. The sound is torn from her, and the lights in the doorway flicker as his hand slips away from her skin and he lurches forward. For one moment, all she sees are dark spots of crimson before she realises he is coughing blood, and he collapses against her. 

. 

Hermione spends Sunday morning in the waiting room at the hospital, warming her hands with a cup of coffee from the shop across the way. Though notes from her current cases are spread across her lap, the words all blur together and she stares blankly at the doorway at the end of the hall. The medics have been coming and going all morning, and she hasn’t let herself think about why she’s here. 

When they took him away, she dropped to her knees on the carpet of her flat, whispering spell after spell until the bloodstains faded to a shadow and the furniture swayed in exhausted dizzy silhouettes against the walls. Her hands were covered in it, and the front of her shirt—she could smell copper, and she stripped frantically, shivering in the scalding heat of the shower. 

Her hair’s still wet and her eyes are bleary, and she wrings her hands together over the notes in her lap. When she thinks about the whole incident, it becomes ridiculous and surreal. Suddenly, she can’t help it: she laughs to herself, a breathy hollow sound, and the receptionist gives her a strange look, and Ginny Weasley walks into the waiting room. 

Hermione stands too quickly, only remembering her forgotten notes after they’re already scattered across the floor, and she bites back some choice words before kneeling. She thinks about gathering everything up but settles to press her fingers into fists over the cold tile instead. “Ginny . . .” she whispers when her friend kneels beside her and calmly begins to reorganise the files. 

“Come on,” Ginny whispers back. “Come on, Hermione. Let’s get you some tea.” 

She links their arms together and pulls them toward the lift, and Hermione closes her eyes and listens to the hum of magic as they rise through the building. When she begins to focus on her surroundings, she’s sitting at a table in the impossibly sunny teashop on the fifth floor, and Ginny is walking toward her with two steaming cups of Ceylon. She casts a silencing charm before she speaks. 

“He’s no longer in critical condition,” she says, and Hermione is listening to her with one half of her mind and thinking about the ghosts of bloodstains on her clothes with the other. “Perhaps it was a curse, or dark magic.” 

“Oh,” Hermione says. “Yes. I see.” 

She is feeling dull and tense, everything around her moving as slowly as dust motes drifting through shafts of sunlight. Ginny reaches across the table and closes her cool fingers over Hermione’s open palm, squeezing tightly. 

“I think you should know this, Hermione: the healer who was on duty when Malfoy came in notified the Aurors when it became clear that—when we realised the nature of the situation.” 

“No, you don’t need to explain,” Hermione says. “I’ll cooperate with Harry’s investigation, of course, though I wasn’t really involved.” 

“Is there nothing about his work that you could tell us? Perhaps this is curse damage or a delayed reaction of some sort.” 

“Ginny, I . . . everything in our department is highly confidential. The Ministry would have been locked down if there had been an error with—I mean, if something had gone wrong. I can tell you that much.” 

“I figured it was a long shot, but still. Hermione, you know I don’t mean to pry, but what was Malfoy doing at your flat?” 

Ginny’s brown eyes are wide and sincere, flecked with honeyed sunshine, and Hermione curls and uncurls her fingers over the tabletop. Her vision is wavering, the white room flickering to a sick shade of yellow, sweat prickling up the back of her neck. In the back of her mind, his voice is a muffled echo: _It followed me home._

“I’m not—I’m not sure . . .” She’s breathing in halting gasps, pressing the back of her hand across her eyes. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she whispers when her fingers come away salty and wet. 

“No, Hermione—oh, no, it’s all right,” Ginny says, sliding around the table to gather her in her arms. With her forehead pressed against Ginny’s shoulder, Hermione smells nothing but fresh lavender. “It’s all right. This all must have been so unexpected, so scary.” 

“I just—it’s that I barely got any sleep last night,” Hermione mumbles into the sleeve of her jacket. “Really, I’m fine, just a little tired.” 

. 

Hermione has seen this room before, though admittedly she was on the other side of the one-way glass. The reflection staring back at her is familiar: her face has taken on the colourless, disaffected expression everyone adopts when looking into a mirror. Since the end of the war, the Ministry has slowly begun to retrofit its older buildings with electricity, and in the white light from overhead, her skin looks pale and her eyes and lips are too red. 

“Sorry about the wait,” Harry says as he strolls into the room, “and the wand thing.” 

She nods. She knows this is procedure: they confiscate her wand for the interrogation and leave her alone just long enough that she’ll start thinking of things to confess. Harry sits across from her at the empty table and watches her over the rims of his glasses. Against the grey stone of the room, his eyes are an impossibly deep shade of green. 

“How are you handling everything?” he says. 

“I’m fine, honestly. I just want this to be over with.” 

“Ginny said you took it all pretty hard.” 

“Harry, I’m running on very little sleep right now.” 

“Right. Got it. If you can just answer a few questions, you’ll be free to go.” He pulls a file out of his briefcase and lays the papers out in front of him. “Okay. What was Draco Malfoy doing at your flat?” 

“How is that relevant?” 

“It’s a very legitimate question. Were you two working a case together?” 

“No. I don’t know what he was doing there.” 

“Hermione, you have to realise this whole thing is incredibly suspicious.” 

“Well, of course I do.” 

“Then why won’t you just answer the question?” 

“You think I’m being evasive? I honestly have no idea what he was doing there.” 

He sighs. “Could you explain, for the record, please, what happened when Malfoy arrived at your residence?” 

She looks up, breathing slowly and deeply. Along the left side of the ceiling, a thin black line of exposed electrical wire snakes across the room, and Hermione wonders whether anyone has caught on that it could be used as a weapon by someone desperate enough. She exhales. “I was awakened by knocking at about two thirty. When I went to answer the door, I found Malfoy in the hall. He seemed stunned, acting strangely . . . I don’t know.” 

“You told the medical staff he collapsed?” 

“Yes.” 

“Could this have been an effect of your wards?” 

“No. They’re only meant to repel.” 

“Did Malfoy say anything to you?” he asks. Overhead, the lights flicker briefly, and Harry glances up. 

Hermione folds her hands in her lap and closes her eyes, willing the world to stop spinning. 

“Please leave your hands on the table,” Harry says, and she blinks back to the present to see him watching her with something that borders the line between deep concern and wariness. “Did he say anything?” 

“No. He yelled a bit, as though he was drunk. None of it made any sense.” 

Harry is jotting down notes in his familiar rigid cursive, and Hermione presses her fingernails into the palms of her hands. She’s so tired that her left eye is twitching uncontrollably. She knows that twitchiness is generally associated with guilt, so she hopes that Harry will either not notice or choose not to comment if he does. “I broke his wrist, I think.” 

“What was that?” Harry says, glancing up from his notes. 

“His wrist. He stuck it in the door as I slammed it shut. There was a snapping sound, bones breaking.” 

“I see.” 

“Did the healers think it was part of the curse?” she murmurs. The table sways beneath her, and she covers her mouth with the back of her hand. Her pulse thrums with a chill like the beginning of a fever, a shaky weakness. 

“Are you all right?” Harry says. “We can stop the interrogation. I have everything I need.” 

“I feel . . .” 

“Okay,” he says, and his hand drifts along her shoulder as the world swims black. “Okay, Hermione. Come on. I’ll take you home.”


	2. Chapter 2

She walks through her flat like a ghost, hovering on the edge of sleep. It’s still early in the afternoon, and though she feels her footsteps growing heavy, she doesn’t want to sleep right now. She has to work tomorrow and wants to avoid throwing off her schedule, so she opens her windows and lays her case files out along her desk. Her mind drifts across the pages from one topic to the next, everything flooding back to the smell of blood on her clothes, and she closes her eyes.

She won’t let herself think about this, so instead she thinks about Ron and the cold space inside her where thoughts of him used to dwell. She realises she can remember with perfect clarity the exact moment she fell out of love with him: he had stopped by after work and brought over takeaway curry, and she wasn’t expecting him because they had never set up a date. She remembers feeling vaguely self-conscious because she had spent the day working on a case from home, and her hair was frizzing out wildly in a halo around her head. She stepped aside and let him in, and they pulled a couple of chairs out onto her balcony. 

This was one month ago, the dead of summer, the thirteenth of August—a Friday, but Hermione had never believed in bad luck. It was still warm enough outside that she didn’t have to put on a sweater. She remembers feeling like the night was building up to something, and the feeling made her uneasy enough that they couldn’t make decent conversation. 

When he finally drew in a breath to speak, she was biting her bottom lip so hard that it hurt. He didn’t kneel down, and afterward she remembered this most of all, the feeling of being caught off guard because he didn’t kneel. He pulled the velvet box from his pocket and placed it on the table between them, and he looked at her without saying anything for a long time. 

She held her breath. Without counting the time they had spent together before the war, and nobody counted that time, because none of it seemed real and they were still children, they had been together for three years. He looked at her and told her she had saved him, and she smiled awkwardly and looked away because instead of feeling love or whatever she was supposed to feel, some nameless emotion (guilt, annoyance, claustrophobia) tightened in her chest at his every word until she couldn’t hear him anymore. There was only the rushing of her pulse in her ears. 

She couldn’t think of anything to say, and she couldn’t tell him what he wanted to hear— _You saved me, too_ —because really, what had they saved each other from? 

She said she needed some time to think about it. Perhaps he had just assumed she would say yes, because he stared blankly at her for a moment before blinking and reaching out as though moving to take the offending ring away before he dropped his hand to his knee instead. 

“Really?” he said. 

“It’s a big decision,” she whispered. After, he stood up and towered over her until she stood, too. 

“I understand,” he said. He left awkwardly, without kissing her goodnight, and when she closed the door behind him she felt so relieved that the feeling flowed straight to her head and made her want to cry. 

He didn’t call her for three days, partly out of a hurt sort of stubbornness but mostly because he still wasn’t too sure about the finer mechanics of the phone system. When he finally dialled her number, she didn’t answer, and he had expected a serious conversation and suddenly found himself at a loss for words. He waited for a moment before finally hanging up, and the click of the receiver recorded into the silence of her home. 

She falls asleep still thinking about that sound. Her arms are crossed over her desk, her forehead pressed against her wrists. 

. 

When she looks back on all of this, Hermione won’t be able to remember exactly how she made it through Monday morning at the Ministry. She stands before the intricate clockwork of the department doors, waiting for the right pattern to fall into place in her memory. Her mind is blank of everything except the image of blood in her doorway, and the whole thing takes much longer than expected. By the time she reaches her desk and sees that her inbox is flooded, a strange sort of tension has wound its way down her spine and through her fingertips. 

There’s a note from Shacklebolt and under that a note from Ron, which states in plain print, _Read the Prophet. Do we need to talk?_ She has time to think of none of this before Harry strides through her office door and leans against the wall, running his hands through tousled hair. 

“I’ve about had it with this whole mess,” he says. “Ginny’s been fielding calls at the hospital all morning.” 

“What calls?” Hermione says, and Harry shoots her a look he must reserve for especially dense people before pulling a copy of the _Daily Prophet_ from his briefcase and sliding it across her desk. She is met by a bold headline: 

MALFOY SON IN CRITICAL CONDITION FOLLOWING SUSPICIOUS INCIDENT! NO COMMENT FROM MINISTRY 

The article is accompanied by a black and white photo of a particularly bored Draco Malfoy staring at a point just out of sight of the lens. She recognises it from the Ministry winter gala the previous year, and a cold sweat begins to climb up the back of her neck. “Can’t we put some sort of gag order on this?” 

“I suppose it’s too late for that now,” he returns. “Better settle in before the storm breaks, in any case.” 

“I don’t understand,” she says, her fingers hovering over the corner of the page. 

“Hermione, just read the damned article.” He sits heavily on a box of case files, one of many that have been scattered haphazardly across the floor of her office since her transfer to the Department of Mysteries. 

She scans across the text until she reaches it: _Hermione Granger, current employee of the Ministry of Magic, is alleged to have been involved in the incident, as the call for medical assistance was placed from her residence at approximately three o’clock this morning._ She presses her fingers to the back of her neck. “That explains the note from Ron.” 

Harry looks up sharply. “You spoke with him?” 

“Oh, no, of course not. He asked if we needed to talk.” 

Harry gives an undignified snort. “Can you blame him? You two have barely spoken since your spat—” 

“It wasn’t a spat.” 

“Misunderstanding, whatever.” He waves his hand through the air. “The next thing he hears is that Malfoy has been traipsing about your flat at all hours.” 

“I assure you there was no traipsing.” 

“Hermione, all he wants is to hear from you.” 

She closes her eyes, waving her wand absently to set a kettle to boil on her back shelf. Harry was the first one she called on the night Ron proposed. She was crying with the back of her hand across her eyes, crouched against the cupboards on her kitchen floor, throat tense and stinging. When she asked him if he’d known what Ron was planning, it came out as an accusation even though that wasn’t how she meant it at all, and she could hear him sighing on the other end of the line. 

He had known, of course, and there was a tense and awkward silence before he apologised for not warning her. She said she didn’t blame him, even though she did, a little bit. Telling him wouldn’t have changed anything. 

“I wouldn’t even know what to say to him,” she says. 

“You’ll figure it out. You and Ron—well, I’m sure everything will turn out all right.” 

“I rejected him,” she says. The words leave a bitter taste. 

“It wasn’t really a rejection, right? You told him you needed some time, and he understands. It’s only that . . . you know.” 

“I don’t know.” 

“I suppose he just—assumed you would agree. Don’t we all assume that sort of thing, eventually?” 

As he speaks, she is pouring out tea into two cups. Harry has always been as bright as a guiding star to her, and the strange bond that’s held them together over the years allows her to look past these moments when she wants nothing more than to scream. He is Harry, her Harry, who finally has everything he ever wanted, who assumes there could never be anything more than that. 

Her hands are steady despite the anxiety building in her chest. This is the same nervous tension she feels whenever she’s about to say something she might regret. Her heart is beating uncomfortably fast in her chest, and every word that crosses her mind threatens to spill out dizzyingly. “I never wanted . . .” 

“Hermione, really, you should be having this conversation with him.” 

“Oh, you’re right, of course,” she says as she stirs milk into his tea. “I just feel like I’ve forgotten how to talk to him, that’s all.” 

“Think of it as just another problem to overcome. You’re good at that.” 

“None of it seems very immediate anymore. I’ve been feeling so strange . . .” 

“You should be resting,” he says. “Did they not tell you they found traces of dark magic on Malfoy at the hospital?” 

“No, I didn’t know.” 

“It’s not uncommon to have side effects after exposure. The Aurors all took precautions afterward.” 

“It’s definitely been taken on as an investigation, then?” 

“As of this morning, yes. Malfoy was suspended from his work here, at least until all of this has been resolved.” 

“I suppose Kingsley will want me to take on his cases. You know, he probably just got into something he couldn’t get himself out of.” 

“You think what happened was because of a department case?” 

She turns away and watches the steam rising from the mouth of the kettle. “That’s the logical conclusion, isn’t it?” 

“There’s always the possibility that he’s gotten into his father’s old business.” 

“His father’s dead, Harry.” 

“You know that’s not the point.” He clenches and unclenches his fist over his knee unconsciously. “Just think twice about taking on his cases, yeah? I worry about you.” 

“Oh, I don’t know, Harry. I’m so tired of talking about all of this. Let’s just—let’s be us, just for a while. Now, will you take one sugar or two?”

**Author's Note:**

>  _Where is the rest of the story?_ This piece is undergoing massive revisions, and the original is no longer available online. If you want a copy of it for your own purposes (or whatever), please get in touch with me through any of the links on my profile. Thanks for your patience!


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